“After the winter we will be here again. There will be much to trade. Come back!”

“We will,” Armun called out, shouting to be heard above the crashing of the waves upon the beach. “We will be here.”

“What did the furry one say?” Hanath asked with clattering teeth, blue with cold. He wrapped one of the new furs about him.

“They want us to trade here again.”

“We will! Next time we will come early and make porro. They will like that.”

“Don’t even suggest it,” Kerrick said. “Not until you have spent a winter snowbound with them. They are a very strange people.”

“I like them,” Morgil said. “They know how to enjoy themselves. Now you can tell us what that horrible black muck was that you buried. I can still smell it.”

“That is what is going to keep us alive when these die,” Kerrick said, picking up his hèsotsan. “The Paramutan make a powerful poison called takkuuk. It can kill the biggest creature in the sea. It will kill murgu too. Now we know how to make it. I don’t know how but Armun remembers, she made it with Kalaleq. It seems very difficult.”

“Not really,” she said. “It is just entrails and blood made to rot in a special way, then certain roots are added. I know the plant, we were always told to never go near it or touch it. Now I know why.”

“The stink will kill us before it kills a marag,” Hanath said.

“I don’t think so.” Kerrick held up his spear. “When the poison is buried a second time it will be in small leather bags that will be wrapped around the spearpoints. We will bury the spears too, special spears only for killing murgu. Then, when we stab a marag, the spearpoint goes through the bag and into the flesh and the thing dies.”

“We can certainly do that,” Morgil said with great enthusiasm. “We will help you, Armun, make a lot of takkuuk spears. Then we can trade them to the other sammads. We can even trek to the valley of the Sasku, trade with them for cloth.”

“You may never hunt again,” Armun said. “You will trade anything now.”

“Of course. We can hunt too, if we want to. But we like trading.”